China acknowledges killing 28, accusing them of role in mine attack

BEIJING - Chinese authorities acknowledged Friday that they had killed 28 people suspected of taking part in an attack on a coal mine in the country's turbulent western frontier, several days after news of the killings first emerged.

Officials in Xinjiang, a sparsely populated swath of desert and mountains near China's border with Kazakhstan, said the people were terrorists who had helped orchestrate an attack on a Chinese coal mine in September, which they said killed 16 people, according to a report by Tianshan, a state-run news website.

"All terrorists - no matter if they are from China or abroad, no matter what they do or where they hide - will be wiped out resolutely, completely and thoroughly," the article said.

Violence has escalated in Xinjiang in recent years amid clashes between the government and Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking minority who are mostly Muslim and make up 40 percent of Xinjiang's population. Chinese leaders have severely restricted freedoms for Uighurs amid concerns that some are using violence to achieve independence.

The details of the operation, which took place last week, were first revealed Wednesday by Radio Free Asia, a news service financed by the U.S. government. The outlet reported that Chinese authorities had killed 17 people in the raid, including several women and children.

China heavily censors information on Xinjiang, and the report by Tianshan on Friday provided few details about those who were killed.

But an image published by several Chinese news outlets showed a journal kept by one of the officers involved in the raid, in which the officer described hearing voices of women and children as the forces approached.

In a section marked "conclusion," the officer wrote, "Anybody who commits violence against the people and the government will pay the price in the face of the people's police and the people's military!"

The image was described on social media websites as coming from the Ministry of Public Security. It was later removed from many Chinese websites, as was a censored version of the image that blurred the detail about women and children.